Greenaway winner Morris reveals Lost Words follow-up

Jackie Morris spent six months, working seven days a week, to complete the artwork for The Lost Words (Hamish Hamilton), which won this year’s CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for Illustration.

Morris’ paean to nature, co-created with Rob Macfarlane (he wrote the poem, or “spells”, and she did the illustrations), has won countless awards already, including Children’s Book of the Year at the Nibbies, but the Greenaway award is “massive, the biggest prize”, said Morris, who was last shortlisted for Something About a Bear (Frances Lincoln Children’s Books) in 2016.

The book was collaborative from the start, said Morris, who approached Macfarlane after he and other authors wrote to the Guardian bemoaning the lack of nature words in the Oxford Junior Dictionary. She initially thought she could compose one illustration for each dictionary definition, but the pair decided to go further and Macfarlane began writing the poems.

Morris, who used watercolours and gold leaf to create the images, said Macfarlane would “feed” her the poems one at a time, often sending instructions on how to read his work. “Every poem came with the instruction to be read aloud,” she said. “He sent me ‘Moths’ from America, and said, ‘Wait until twilight and read it by candlelight’.

“I would send pictures in progress and occasionally say, ‘If you leave out this word, it reads better’, for example. I went ahead with ‘Raven’ without him, thinking nothing could change how I painted the raven... But when I got the raven spell, of course I had to start again. At times 10–15 emails were flying back and forth.”

She initially imagined framing the text in a manner similar to a Medieval grimoire—where text and illustrations are often interlaced—but realised that the reader needed space around the text to focus on the words. “Between the words and the images there is enough room for the reader’s imagination. There is space for the reader to step in—not everything is spelled out.”

They took one poem and a piece of artwork to Hamish Hamilton, part of Penguin Random House, and Morris said the team, including assistant editor Hermione Thompson and designer Alison O’Toole, immediately “got it”.

Morris is particularly full of praise for O’Toole, who led on the book cover’s distinctive lettering, saying: “I’ve been in books now for 27 years and have never worked with anyone like her. I don’t want to work with anyone else again!”

Since its 2017 launch, The Lost Words has taken on a life of its own, with multiple crowdfunding campaigns taking place to buy copies of the books for primary schools and charities. Morris has painted artwork from the book in hospitals, and has worked with a collective of musicians who created an album inspired by the poems. She is more in demand than ever, she said, but is carving out enough time to create a new book with Macfarlane, this time solely about birds.

“The Book of Birds is at a really early stage—it’s like an egg at the moment. It’s very different. I’m trying to catch the movement of flight, so it’s a lot looser. It’s sketchy, in a way.”